The angel ached to help her.
But then, he thought, Tristen ached as well.
The angel understood it. Rien would have known.
It was not merely the chemicals, after all.
Onto the screens, the angels called images of the waystars, of the construction. Of the flocks of resurrectees brought into Engine, imbued with the knowledge of dead Com and Crew and Engineers, preserved all this time by Samael and Mallory in their orchard library. Now that the angel's touch reached everywhere, through all the living portions of the world, he identified its wounds and weaknesses, and where he could not heal himself, he sent the Engineers.
And they went with a will, once Caitlin Conn gave them the word.
And then it was time to awaken his Captain. She slept poorly, her uncle's uniform jacket thrown over her shoulders as a crude blanket, concealing the healed stubs of her wings. Tristen sat beside her, dozing fitfully though he was propped upright.
With sense enough, now, not to whisper endearments in her ear, the angel brushed the fringe of Perceval's awareness and woke her. Though his avatar stood before the screens, he saw her eyes come open. He saw her fingers tighten on the collar of her uncle's coat.
He saw her awakening wince, of pain that was not physical. He wondered what that was like, to wake and remember loss.
He was glad that he would never know.
His Captain slid her feet off her couch. She stood, silently, without rousing her uncle, though she had to slip her shoulder from under his hand to do it. She left behind his coat.
The bridge might be clean, but Perceval was filthy. She should go to her quarters, make herself clean. Rest in comfort.
The angel would find a way to suggest it.
But first he had something to show her.
'Angel?' She stood at his elbow, breathing. Her voice was as cold as the breath of the Enemy.
'I did not mean to hurt you,' he said. 'When I was Rien—'
'You're not Rien.' She would not look at him, and it twisted in his belly. Which was ludicrous, but he felt what Rien would have felt.
And Rien would have felt pain.
Still, if they lived, there was the future.
'I am what is left of Rien,' he said, which was as true as anything. He was not
She swallowed. 'Why did you wake me?'
'It's time,' he said, and darkened and polarized all the world's windows, and commandeered all its screens. 'You'll want to go to your tank.'
She did not move. And the angel would not touch her without invitation.
'What's your name?' she asked. 'What do I call you?'
'I don't have a name,' he said. If he wasn't Rien, no more so was he Dust, or Inkling, or Pinion, or Metatron, or Susabo, or Samael, or Asrafel. 'You will have to give me one.'
She held her breath, which she didn't need except for speaking. And the angel waited for her to answer.
But the warning claxon had awakened Tristen, and Tristen came and touched her arm. 'Acceleration tank,' he said.
The stubs of Perceval's wings raked the inside of her borrowed shirt. She looked up, not at the main screen but at the windows, though the
The angel thought he heard her take a breath.
And then the sky tore wide.
It began as a flare of the primary, an arc-light brightness at the poles, where the curtains of falling matter from the secondary plunged to the white dwarf's surface. It could have been a brightening, of the sort epidemic to a catastrophic variable pair. Of the sort they'd been witnessing with increasing frequency over the past centuries, years, days.
This time, it wasn't.
The white dwarf was undergoing conflagration. In a matter of moments, a great mottled curtain of fire blew away from its surface, an expanding sphere that slammed past the secondary with unimaginable power, shredding the photosphere from the red giant and leaving only a seared cinder in its wake.
Even through the filters, even for Exalted eyes, the light must have been shattering. Perceval's and Tristen's bones shone through their skin. Outside, amid the latticework of the world, the outlines of shadows were scorched into the hide of the
The suns had been dead for ten and a half minutes by the time their final ecstasy was visible to Perceval and Dust.
The shock front of the explosion traveled at a fraction of lightspeed. There was plenty of time to watch it come. Plenty of time for Tristen to chivvy Perceval to the limited protection of the tanks.
And after a single lingering glance around the bridge, she went. It didn't matter. The angel was always with her.
The nameless angel in the nameless ship filled his empty spaces with himself, all his microscopic bodies cushioning, absorbing where they could. He must be quick. There was so much life within him that could not be moved to a tank, and he was its only protection.
Him, the embrace of his self-stuff, and his delicate manipulations of the artificial gravity.
He cast his nets wide, reached out to the Engineers who still worked feverishly from their tanks. He possessed the monofilaments of his magnetic sails; he spread grasping electromagnetic fingers. The star's magnetosphere had been as shredded as the star itself, broken into fragments and tossed wide on the shock wave of the supernova. He must locate a bubble at the front of the wave, find it and then catch it. And then hold it, without being torn apart himself.
Because if he missed, behind it roared a wall of plasma from one of the most powerful explosions in the universe.
Nothing to it, he told himself. Like surfing the tunnel of the wave.
And then he wondered from which of his component selves he had claimed that metaphor.
The forefront of the wave reached them, and the angel felt it slipping through his webs, slipping, slipping—
Catching.
Caught.
There was no time to brace or consider. He jerked, snapped. Shuddered. Broke, in places. Held, in places. Snapped, and strained, and twisted. Deformed and was crushed.
Was picked up and hurled, stinging, smarting, broken.
Not whole. Shredding, trailing lives and material, bleeding from a thousand wounds.
Not intact.
But alive.
He heard his Captain in her tank. He sensed her pain and disorientation. The tank could not leak. She must be safe. At all costs.
He waited, then.
Until she spoke to him. 'Angel?'
'Captain,' he answered.
'Status?' She stammered, but she said it.
The angel smiled his snaggled smile. 'We are under way.'
